My "worse is better" is using plain text instead of markdown. I still have no idea how newlines work in markdown.

Newlines work in markdown the same way they do in plain text, because markdown is plain text.

If you have something that’s converting markdown into a rich view and it’s not doing that, the problem isn’t with markdown, it’s with your markdown parser.

Two spaces before the newline for a new line, two lines for a paragraph break